“Post production is a real creative process”. In your own experience, how did post production enable you to explore media practices in your coursework?

The brief for the task in the preliminary task was to create a short extract in which there are two lines of dialogue, an opening of a door at some point, all the while keeping to the 180’ rule and ensuring continuity is constructed. In the final piece the brief was slightly different as it was to construct an opening to a horror production, establishing both character and genre. We did this through camerawork, editing, mise-en-scene, and sound. We decided to make our piece within the supernatural sub-genre, in which two teenage boys search an abandoned house to test the tales of hauntings that have taken place over the years. Normal conventions have been reversed as we have male victims (protagonists) with a female antagonist. Post production was an important aspect of this as editing enabled us to construct continuity and add certain effects in order to make our piece look as professional as possible.

To create a professional feel we added a camera overlay with reduced opacity to the handicam shots in order to create a more realistic look as if someone were using a hand held camera. We did this both in our preliminary task along with our final piece as we like the effect it created. A specific example of when it was used is within our final piece in the handicam shot of Alex and Fin walking through the dark hallway. The inclusion of a swinging chandelier and dialogue we felt helped to increase tension and construct a sense of fear within the audience. This shot we felt reinforced isolation and fear within the clip, especially with the matched cut of music and light in unison.

To help establish and imply to the audience the prestige of the production, we used Adobe After Effects for the title. This ensured that our final piece looked more professional and not such an amateur production. The animation of ‘Wakefield Manor’ appears on the screen in a bold white text based on a plain black background. Lines start to shoot through the text in black slowly reducing the amount of the title that is visible to us as the audience. Once all the text is nearly removed, a loud church bell sound rings and a cut to black transition is put into effect. It is put in not only to make the production look more professional but also to construct an eerie and isolated atmosphere.

The challenges we had to overcome in this process were mainly ICT problems that came about along with the resources we were limited to. At the end of post production, just finishing the final touches to editing our final piece, we faced problems with Adobe Premier which wouldn't allow us to export our files and continuously crashed. The resources and software we were limited to were also a slight issue. We had a reasonably basic editing software to work with (Adobe Premier Elements 9.0), in comparison to professional film companies that use a higher quality software enabling them to make more professional looking films. This wasn't a major issue as everyone was working on the same software thus nobody became streaks ahead of any other groups, yet we feel we could have made a much more professional looking piece with more advanced software.